Craft Cannery CEO Paul Guglielmo is no stranger to innovation. The Conneaut, Ohio, native launched his career in the packaged foods industry with a simple idea in mind: develop a line of sauces honoring “Grandpa Pete,” the esteemed host of Sunday Sauce, a weekly gathering and family tradition that became a priceless staple of Guglielmo’s Midwestern childhood.
Guglielmo, an Italian American and longtime host of the popular podcast Pauly Guglielmo Show, moved to Rochester in 2007 to pursue work in radio. A lover of all things Italian, Guglielmo, who spent time in Italy as a high school exchange student, was homesick for his family and the culture he’d grown up around.
While working in the radio industry and living in an apartment on East Avenue, Guglielmo began visiting the East Avenue Wegmans on a regular basis. His goal was to recreate his grandfather’s legendary sauce. “I knew my grandfather was getting older, so I wanted to do something special for him,” says Guglielmo. “Grandpa Pete was like a celebrity in our hometown. Everyone knew him for his sauce.”
With only twenty cases of product to his name, the radio host turned sauce maker launched Guglielmo Sauce in the summer of 2014. Fortunately, Guglielmo’s entrepreneurial spirit and vested interest in problem solving had trained him to think big. “I was always fascinated by entrepreneurship,” he says. “Back home [in Ohio], I started a wedding business and a basketball league. I loved going out to find little local businesses.”
Rochester was the perfect location for Guglielmo’s dream. “I love that Rochester is truly a midsize city,” he says. “It has some of the benefits of being a city and some of benefits of being a small town at the same time.”
And this is a community known for its ardent support of local development. “Genesee County is amazing to work with. [The county is west of] Monroe County and consistently attracts business from there as well,” says Guglielmo. “In Genesee County, I can make a phone call, and, within a couple of weeks, I’ll have a whole roomful of people asking how they can help,” he adds.
However, as Guglielmo started seeking manufacturers to produce his sauce, he discovered that many regional businesses maintained strict minimum batch size requirements. At the time, Guglielmo Sauce was in its infancy, so large-scale production was not financially feasible.
“The reason there are not a ton of competitors in this space is because starting up the business is capital intensive,” says Guglielmo. “You can’t just wake up one morning and decide to start a manufacturing service. The biggest challenge is looking at what needs to happen next and the price tag on that growth.”
Guglielmo’s early efforts to accelerate progress included visiting farmer’s markets and festivals, placing cold calls, and facing constant rejection. “I started out in my early twenties,” he says, “and had no access to [the requisite] funds.”
The present-day CEO of Craft Cannery saved money by working a series of odd jobs, including a stint as a bartender and a position in a haunted house, before eventually finding a local manufacturer who could help. Despite being near capacity, the producer was willing to take on Guglielmo’s sauce.
Business began trending upward. Even so, Guglielmo continued to ponder what he recognized as a major dilemma within the packaged foods industry. How could manufacturers cater to—and sustain—small clients while simultaneously keeping themselves afloat?
In 2020, Guglielmo founded Craft Cannery in an effort to solve this pervasive capacity problem. Within its first year of operation, Craft Cannery increased production by one hundred percent. By 2023, Guglielmo had established a professional partnership with Wegmans Food Markets, Inc., garnering additional visibility. “Wegman’s was a huge stepping stone,” Guglielmo says. “They invited us to produce one of their items, so now we were going to be creating a product with the Wegman’s label on it.”
Craft Cannery continued to flourish, but, over the years, Guglielmo never lost sight of the problem he’d built it to solve. “We are a marriage of start-ups and larger brands,” says Guglielmo. “Small capacity manufacturing is great for local entrepreneurs but also for the category merchants at supermarkets—like Wegman’s Food Markets—because they carry specialty items. At the same time, we also run higher volume [production] for the more regional or even national brands.”
With Craft Cannery, consumers get the best of both worlds—often side-by-side. When I toured the facility—decked out in the required baby blue hairnet—employees were hand-bottling one product while another moved through an assembly line running at a speed of thirty bottles per minute. After traversing the lines, all products are tested for various measures of quality, including temperature and acidity.
While Guglielmo enjoys most aspects of his role, the sauce maker finds nothing more invigorating than a new product launch. “I think, ‘Wow, we created an actual thing in the world that somebody is going to love. Something that never existed in the world now exists and it’s because we exist.’”
As for the future of Craft Cannery, Guglielmo can count on it being bright… and maybe even a little bit boring. “My accountant says that boring businesses bring bank,” he says. “And when you talk about entrepreneurs, a lot of people are looking for the really sexy thing.”
Instead, Guglielmo advises, “Find an area of the world where there’s no janitorial service and start a janitorial services business. You’re going to do better than somebody chasing the latest tech trend to become a billionaire.”
For Guglielmo, problem solving and innovation are, well, the secret sauce.
“To this day, I make my grandfather’s marinara sauce—Guglielmo’s Home Grown Marinara Sauce—at home for my family. There’s something special about when we run that sauce. I walk into [Craft Cannery] here, and it smells like my grandfather’s house. For me, that’s living the dream.”
This article originally appeared in the November/December 2026 issue of (585).
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